


For A Couple Bucks More

by Avid Moron (Nevermore9)



Category: Zootopia (2016)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Beating, Crimes & Criminals, Drugs, Gang Violence, Gangsters, Heist, M/M, Male Homosexuality, Marijuana, Nudity, Organized Crime, Robbery, Smoking, Suggestive Themes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-21
Updated: 2016-07-25
Packaged: 2018-07-25 18:54:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,433
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7544059
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nevermore9/pseuds/Avid%20Moron
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nick Wilde is a full-fledged cop, but when an old partner in crime draws him in for one final hustle, his job, and his best friend will be put in jeopardy. Can Finnick save him and his new life, or will he lose everything he has worked for?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Two Foxes and a Copper

The stoplight flashed red just as Nick barreled past. He pulled along the curb, eyes set on a van needing a ticket badly. It sat directly beside the bright sign marking the fire lane. "No Parking", in wide white letters, reflected the glare of Nick's headlights. Here was this punk, practically phoning for an officer to stop and lay down a hefty fine on his forehead. What's worse, Nick could smell the pungency of cold, hard cannabis as he cracked the door.  
Following protocall, Nick checked the driver's seat window. Empty. But, at the tail end, doors thrummed with a baritone beat. Vulgar ryhmes centering around the reproductive organs of a mare blared above the bustle of traffic. Shouts of savage road rage were drowned out by the song referencing a certain special aspect of a male canine's genitalia, and its relationship to the mare in question.  
Nick pounded on the back of the van. It was at least a full minute before he heard the faintest trace of movement on the other side. All while he waited, the overpowering scent of marijuana irritated his nostrils. Impatience was setting in like a fast acting brew. "Open up!"  
Before the first word entirely escaped Nick's mouth, the door swung open on its hinges with rusted difficulty. "I thought I heard your slimy ass voice."  
"Finnick?"  
Glazed, bloodshot eyes stared back at Nick. The fennec wore a flat frown on his face. Lazily, he glanced Nick over. Then with a single nod from his ex-partner, Nick found himself climbing into the back of the van as if they were going to discuss what suckers on the sidewalk would make them the most dough. Finnick slammed the door behind Nick with the bitter force of a scorned housewife.  
"Where the fuck you been?" Finnick said. Nick coughed as the fennec puffed on a joint nestled between two of his phalanges.  
Taking a seat on a cardboard box, filled with what felt like bricks to his butt, Nick twiddled with his dewclaws. On the walls, he couldn't help but be distracted by nude posters. Behind him, a kangaroo teased the nipples beneath her elastic pouch. To the side, an elephant reared her hindquarters. And over Finnick's shoulder, a gazelle stretched her legs so that every detail of her vagina was on display. Nick's memory was wiping itself clear.  
Finnick snapped his fingers. He noted the red fox's police uniform with a sour curl of his lips. "Has Halloween come early, or are you a bigger prick than I remember?"  
Nick's attention was suddenly all over the fennec fox. The way Finnick leaned against the ramshackle clutter of his van, building himself up to be tough, made the atmosphere feel somehow off. He always did seem to be compensating for something. Maybe it was his size. Maybe it was his emotional state, or a tragic past he never told anybody about.  
"Well? Don't tell me you're in the fuzz now."  
Broadening a sly grin, Nick traced his badge. "Fine. I won't say it."  
"Fuck you," Finnick snapped.  
"Fuck me?"  
"Fuck you! Leaving without so much as a 'Ciao, Finnick, catch you sometime.' Mio Dio, you just show up with your fucking gettup. Vaffanculo, Nick."  
The red fox inhaled deeply, not caring how much the smoke in the van burned his lungs. Could this really be his fault? If he was in his right mind he'd slap a pair of child size cuffs on Finnick's wrists and haul him to the backseat of a police cruiser. Yet, Nick found it impossible to think of his job. Unusual as it was, he'd fallen prey to the clutches of a severely repressed emotion. He simply wished he knew the name of it.  
On the edge of a miscellaneous box, Finnick tapped out the remainder of the joint in his paw. He followed Nick and took a breath, which eased the tension, if only slightly. At the very least, there was no more anger to add to the punch of smoke and rap already suffocating the van.  
Finnick straightened his ears like a businessman would straighten his tie after a stressful bargain. "How about a light?"  
Nick looked up with the blind innocence of a middle schooler. "Like, a joint?"  
"No, like my dick," Finnick said. The frank tone of his voice was as nonchalant as a rhinoceros ordering a pizza. Without waiting for a final answer, Finnick drew out two blunts from an old cigarette pack.  
One of the homemade blunts had forced itself between Nick's teeth before he could decline. In the corner, Finnick dropped his pants and chewed on the cigar paper. Pissing into a waste bucket, he toyed around with the cap of a lighter. He shook himself when the stream was finished, to let any stray droplets fall at a faster pace. Nick tried not to stare.  
Finnick lit Nick's blunt and his own while fastening the button on his shorts. The cannabis took hold of his senses more immediately than Nick expected. He blinked and Finnick had suddenly pulled out a mildew covered box to use as a makeshift chair. Ash spilled onto Nick's lap while the cig burned. Mimicking the fennec, Nick gave his blunt a few determined puffs. Gray exhaust scattered like marbles from Nick's attempt to take a sophisticated drag. Meanwhile, Finnick blew unsteady rings.  
"Show off," Nick beamed. When he began chuckling to himself he became worried it was the first symptom. What would Judy say if she found him like this? A police officer reaching a high with a known scam artist as if it was as normal as a friendly barbeque with the neighbors.  
A hoarse laugh from Finnick should have made Nick jump. He could imagine a muscle-bound buffalo tearing the van in two before beating him with a police baton. Punishment would be completely justified, and horrorific, but despite the threat of buffalo, Nick felt rather mellow. In fact, he was never so relaxed, knowing any of his coworkers could bust him in the middle of a career ending act. Stress going out the wìndow in a stressful situation was surprisingly empowering. Nick felt untouchable on his own private cloud nine.  
"So," Finnick declared, interrupting a hazy thought drifting in and out of Nick's brain. The fennec tapped the box under his tail with a smug smirk. "Wanna know what's inside?"  
Blankly, Nick watched the soft pink of his friend's massive ears. He wanted to say something obvious like "porno magazines", but decided to give Finnick the satisfaction of having him speechless.  
Pausing for the sake of dramaticism, Finnick leaned in towards Nick. The acrid scent of Finnick's dwindling blunt mingled with the red fox's own fog of smoke, both tastes entering his lungs together. Finnick locked eyes with Nick. "Synthetic catnip."  
Nick coughed, momentarily gagging on his cig. "What?"  
The little fox folded his arms across his chest, savoring Nick's bewilderment. Nick wanted desperately to know what crazed entity had possessed Finnick to cause him to tote such a narcotic. A few grams of the stuff was enough to paint a target spanning the entire city on a carrier's back. Since mayor Lionheart's rise to power, synthetic drugs, especially the catnip dilemma, recieved a particularly high status concerning the most dangerous threats to Zootopia. How many pounds could Finnick stuff into a commonplace cardboard box? Nick guessed it was enough to have an entire district sent to prison. Ten years time. Minimum.  
"Have you gone completely ape?" Nick exploded, sounding more like Finnick's rough self than Finnick did at the moment.  
"Let me finish."  
Sighing, Nick combed his paws over his ears. He just barely managed to calm himself down.  
"Well," Finnick began, drumming ash from his blunt onto the edge of his seat. "You seen those old black and white flicks. The gangbanger, heist type. Like Ocean's 27?"  
"What about them?"  
"I need you for something is all," Finnick said with noticeable difficulty.  
Forgetting high risk drugs and a decade behind bars, Nick perked up, happy to have found a position of dominance. Finnick needed him, and so the cards were on Nick's side of the table. "Oh, do you?"  
"Shut up!" The fennec immediately made it a point to distance his words from any sense of closeness. "Don't think I've gone all soft. Call it one final hustle."  
Puffing his cig with a new air of confidence, Nick gestured to the cargo of synthetic catnip beneath Finnick's tiny hindquarters. Suddenly he wondered if there was an equally illegal stash hidden in his own seat. "Those?"  
Finnick shook his head. The way his tall ears shifted as he did brought a smile to Nick's face. "Those don't suit you," the fennec said. "I was thinking something more our pace."  
Their pace. It sounded workable to Nick. Turning jumbo pops into house paint and lumber. There was nothing technically unlawful about that, it was a societal principal, if anything. "Deal then," Nick said.  
The cocky grin twitching on the corners of Finnick's lips when Nick agreed could have rivaled the wormiest politician. Nick returned a slimy smirk, being reminded of the countless schemes they'd hatched together. Every hustle ended and began with the same smiles. However, Finnick caught the red fox off guard when he produced a knife, as if he were preforming a cheap magic trick. Without a hint of acknowledgement to the pain that had to sting him, Finnick slid the serrated blade across his open paw and handed it to Nick.  
"Blood pact."  
Flexing his paw, Nick huffed his disapproval, but took the knife nevertheless. "Blood pact," he nodded while he pierced the center of his paw. They shook in a matter-of-fact exchange. The warmth of Finnick's bodily fluid crept over Nick's skin, leaving him with bated breath. The foxes' blood intermixed, binding the both of them, at least until the job they had subscribed to was done.  
After their unspoken contract was signed in crimson, there was no reason for Nick to remain in the van. So, the officer settled for kicking up his feet and smoking through the rest of his blunt. Nick payed no consideration to Finnick's signal of eyeing the door. While Nick entered into a state of relaxation, Finnick flicked his burnt out cig towards the bucket he pissed in. Apparently, the fennec preferred not to keep company longer than necessary.  
"You should head out, Nick."  
The red fox seemed shocked, but still hopeful. "I thought I'd crash here tonight, Big Guy."  
Finnick took an inner pleasure from the use of his fond nickname, but he wasn't so easily swayed. "I wouldn't want you to hang around and lose your shiny new badge. Besides," Finnick gave a stern thwack to the box under him. "I have to take care of this shit."  
"Alright then," Nick sighed, putting his blunt to rest. "Catch you tomorrow, Big Guy."  
Nodding ceremoniously, Finnick bid "Ciao, baby," and Nick showed himself out.  
In the dead of night, it was breezily cold. The traffic had vanished. Not a car cruised by, and Nick could strut with a merry gait and let satisfaction light up his face without having to pretend he'd done something about the van in the fire lane. Yet, Nick's joyful comfort in his surroundings lasted too shortly, because, who happened to be awaiting him at the side of his police cruiser? Judy Hopps.  
"You have a lot of explaining to do, Mister."  
Nick's ears sank like anchors. Shame, rising in his chest, was all he could feel while Judy glared at him as if he'd broken an ancient childhood promise, incubated over the years with trust. Her trust was lying shattered across the asphalt of the street. She didn't care to yell at him. Her voice was colder than the night harboring them.  
"I," was the only measly word Nick could think to muster. Judy held up her paw, having none of it. The pinkness of her rabbit nose probed the air. She watched Finnick's van drive off and disappear further down the road, waiting. Then, sniffing again, she had what she was searching for. It was the stench of cannabis, with an undertone of gasoline, covering the red fox like a perfume.  
"The fuck, Nick?"  
The fox opened his mouth, the beginning of a sound lingering at the back of his throat. What was he supposed to say? Judy didn't need to cut him off, his jaw snapped shut, defeated. Nick followed officer Hopps to her police cruiser without protest. Judy ushered Nick into the passenger seat while she took the wheel. Nick thought about his car, like it mattered in the situation he was in.  
"You fucked up," Judy said, and that was all she said. Nick had figured the dreadful silence between him and her was the worse it could get. Now he wished that the quiet would devour him again, but the bunny's chagrin inhabited every slice of empty space. Judy's words repeated in Nick's mind, invading him like a poison. "You fucked up."  
Nick wished the buffalo would have gotten him instead.  
No one spoke for the duration of the ride to Nick's apartment. Neither of them so much as glanced in the direction of the other. It wasn't until they had parked at the front of the housing complex that Nick dared to say something. A tiny thing. He said, "Don't I have a lot of explaining to do?"  
"Tomorrow." Judy watched the rearview mirror when she said it. Nick got out of the car.  
His apartment was the same temperature as the outside. Nick went straight to bed, not bothering to strip off his work clothes. Sleep didn't come for half of an hour. He merely laid on his mattress, coming up with a list of one hundred ways the night could have played out differently. Maybe if he did something other than what he had done he'd feel better, but dwelling on it didn't help ease any pain. Fed up with planning a way to make up with Judy, Nick held Finnick firmly in his mind, and fell asleep.


	2. Visitors

Nick awoke feeling more nauseous than he had been at his seventh birthday party. The pounding of the doorbell inside his skull coaxed Nick out of bed, after several minutes of shaking off clingy bad dreams. He sulked through his apartment barefoot and answered the door with a crestfallen frown, barely noticing he was still in his disheveled uniform from last night. Before Nick had the chance to address his visitor, upon cracking the door, a bolt of fur blew past him.   
Finnick was at the kitchen table by the time Nick turned around. Groceries were on the counter, mostly consisting of a box of doughnuts, and Finnick was making himself at home by digging through them. "Got any booze?"  
"If I did," Nick said. "I'd be holding a bottle right now."  
"You do look like shit."  
Taking a seat, Nick managed a chuckle. "Yeah? You certainly know how to make me blush."  
Between munches of a glazed doughnut, Finnick said "I can see you're red all over."  
"And I can see you're small all over."  
"Not all over," Finnick replied, naturally, with that smug smirk of his that always lit Nick up like a string of Christmas lights. The fennec seemed thoroughly satisfied by the smile Nick let slip out. It appeared the little fox, or apparently not so little fox, wasn't as cold hearted as he led Nick to believe. Because, with showing up to his apartment unannounced and eating his food, Nick was starting to believe his back was covered more than he originally thought.  
"Hmm. I forgot about those ears of yours. They're gargantuan."  
"You know what I mean, prick," Finnick snorted, half amused and partially annoyed.  
"Exactly," Nick said.  
Miscellaneous crumbs scattered onto the floor while Finnick licked his chops clean. He leaned back in his chair, collecting together a serious face. "Let's talk business."  
Nick failed to surpress a yawn. "I'm all ears."  
"There's going to be a break in at Stonewall Penitentiary, tomorrow, around midnight. I need you to leave the old warden an anonymous tip, both of you being in service to the law and all." Finnick scratched his chin, watching Nick's reaction of disbelief. "Don't think I'm dropping this intel for the sake of justice. When Kozlov tries to extract his man, it's best for him to be tied up, so we can set things into motion."  
Slowly, Nick ran his claws through his whiskers. The utter shock of Finnick's plan had died down, and now the fox was nothing besides thoughtful. For a brief moment he might've believed Finnick was reporting the crime for the reason of doing the right thing. The name of Kozlov thrown in to the scheme was a game changer. Yet, it was less out of left field than if Finnick had wanted to do good just to do good.  
As Nick took everything in, the imagery of small time hustles on the sidewalk faded away. With a figure like Kozlov, Finnick's idea had to be much grander. It was a scale he never tasted before, and unlike turning a bucket of melted popsicle into a bucket of house paint, very illegal, and life threatening. Suddenly Nick was furious.  
"Kozlov? You said something low key. 'Our speed.' That's what you said!"  
Finnick lost interest in the half of a doughnut he was nibbling. "This is our speed, Nick. Give yourself some credit. No penny pinching purse snatcher's got a shot. This is for you, and this is for me. You've done theatrical before."  
"Look, Big Guy, I don't know how much money your riding on, but I take it it's a lot. So if you're pressed for cash, I can find a way to get you out of whatever you're in."  
"I'm not in anything," Finnick snapped.  
"Then why the huge risk?"  
Under Nick's interrogation, the fennec grit his teeth. If he was spontaneously replaced by a Spanish bull, it'd be hard to find anything amiss. "Call it a family matter, okay."  
"I thought you didn't have a family," Nick said.  
"To everyone, except you, I don't."  
Beaming, the red fox folded his arms in triumph. "You've confirmed my suspicions."  
"What fucking suspicions are those?"  
"The ones that say I know you more than you'd like."  
Finnick spat towards the sink, narrowly missing. "That'd be sweet, if it didn't make me want to vomit onto your slimy ass cop gettup."  
Nick smiled softly to himself, savoring the affection hidden between the ruggedness of his friend's dialogue. It was a welcomed distraction from the impending dread of the work day. Perhaps, Nick began thinking, he wasn't a righteous officer at all, if his passion for justice could be so easy manipulated by a half pint fennec.  
Pulling out of his seat, Finnick pushed a partly eaten doughnut Nick's way. "I'll see you around. Preferably sometime soon. Kozlov's place, on the other side of Monument Station, needs to be scoped out. Got that? And don't forget your business with the warden."  
"Uh-huh."  
As he left Finnick mumbled a vague curse. Nick didn't bother turning around.  
It took Nick longer than he'd care to admit for him to realize the front door was wide open on its hinges. The gentle thump of footsteps alerted him. At first, Nick was sure he'd find Finnick in the doorway, but as sense dawned on him, he was only hoping he'd find Finnick in the doorway, rather than a vicious cat burglar. In truth, the actual culprit hadn't crossed his mind. Yes, it was Judy Hopps.  
"You look...terrible," Judy said as the red fox approached. Terrible was an accurate word for him too. The fox's posture was crooked, his ears slumped, his eyes sagged, and his attire was bedraggled to point of mistaking it for anything but what it was, an officer of the law's uniform. Nick certainly did look terrible.  
"Hmm," was all he could say, in between a poorly stifled yawn.  
Judy sighed, recapturing the point of her showing up. "You're going to be late for work."  
"Hmm."  
"Car's outside, douche." And with that she thumped off, not caring if the fox was tailing her, but grinning with a certain amount of satisfaction at giving Nick what was coming to him. Though, really, she'd hardly begun her rain of insults and guilt trips. She wouldn't stop either, until one thousand apologies lay at her feet. She felt fairly confident of that.  
Nick did follow, however.


End file.
